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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article.

I still don't really understand what there is worth talking about here. Twitter is notoriously overstaffed, and any new management would start by cutting non-essential engineer positions.

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Notoriously overstaffed based on what? The fact that you've heard this repeated in different ways over a long period of time?

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

Had $5b in annual revenue and served hundreds of million of tweets daily?

Those 280 characters must generate some immense traffic.

Got itself valued at $44B with that revenue and with substantial annual losses. In a way, Twitter has been hugely successful.

Certainly to people that sold Musk stock lmao.

*launched and landed

I don't see how you can compare two unrelated companies staffing levels. You are simply implying complexity has a direct correlation to the correct workforce amount.

Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets

I guess probably a third of SpaceX is technicians, and Twitter doesn’t really build anything or operate any store fronts.

How large of a sales team does SpaceX have (or need)? How about SpaceX's privacy compliance and data governance? Red team to try to see how a feature could be used nefariously? Internationalization of the content? Moderation and content teams to make sure that the sales or marketing doesn't have to answer awkward questions about why advertisements are showing up in disreputable parts of the site?

Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.

> Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store.

This is a terrible example and you know it. Walmart has physical stores everywhere.

That's exactly the point - Twitter had sales reps & SpaceX didn't. Twitter had moderators and SpaceX didn't. The companies have different external-facing relationships at every level, even ignoring the obviously massive unrelated engineering differences.

5000 salespeople and moderators? Please... They don't need that.

Besides, my comment was about Walmart, which has over 10,000 stores... So of course they have more employees than Twitter by a huge margin.

Wow, you seem to know a lot about running multibillion dollar companies in completely different industries!

So let's imagine you run Twitter and you're operating in every western country on the planet. Now, all those countries have different laws and regulations. Are you, the CEO/coder/whatever going to be the one who sits down with regulators and discuss the nuance of their laws? How are you going to deal with law enforcement requests? FOIA requests from journalists? What kinds of information can you store about users in different locales? What kind of government compliance do you need to have in place for enterprise customers? How many hours per week are you allowed to require for workers in Germany? Can your translation contractors in Poland work through the holidays? Or maybe you consider lawyers just another one of those pesky salespeople/moderators who gets in the way of genius?

That's just one tiny segment of the company. Try to imagine how many other moving parts there are besides the four roles of "CEO," "coder," "salesperson," and "moderator."

You don't know what they need, you don't have any useful information.

The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.

> The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy.

No, it's because they haven't done anything innovative in a decade and their product is much simpler than a ton of tech companies with half the staff... Their stock price was super depressed and they were losing what, $4 million per day?

It's super obvious for anyone remotely financially literate that they were way overstaffed. Any buyer would have laid off at least half the staff...

Even Jack Dorsey admitted it: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/jack-dorsey-speaks-twitter...

> The other company.. does what?

Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.

Managing satellites is labor-intensive. Setting up a really big database and talking to advertisers is not rocket science. Both companies could probably operate with a lower headcount, but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it. They're not worth $44 billion in their wildest dreams, and they've already been hemorrhaging revenue for the better half of a decade. An operationally viable Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter.

This statement

"but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it"

Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".

You also said

"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."

How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter

Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.

> Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX.

Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees

> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS

Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid

I mean if you count the farmers who grew the beans that the astronauts ate then you could say 'we all' worked on Crew Dragon.

> I mean if you count the farmers who grew the beans that the astronauts ate then you could say 'we all' worked on Crew Dragon.

But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.

A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?

> If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.

Again, OP didn't do that. In the article, Elon Musk's quote didn't reference "all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that [SpaceX] is built on."

Based on the staff they actually need.

Need based on what?

Well, you need one person to press the big red "restart container" button in Kubernetes, and another person to bump the resource limits. So at least two people, in my professional experience.

So based on nothing.

I mean, yeah. You can definitely automate both of those tasks but it's nice to pay someone to be accountable for fixing it.

Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing.

But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.

Wait you don’t get the login pop up anymore? I still get it constantly, makes twitter pretty much unusable when not logged in

I'm using Chromium on desktop Linux, I can scroll through recommended content and user profiles without getting the fullscreen login modal anymore. Maybe it's not rolled out to mobile yet?

BTW, I still get this, and it used to just make me go "oh well, I guess they don't want me to look at this web site" and close the window. But someone recently tipped me off to something I am embarrassed I never noticed before: if you actually click "login" on that popup and then cancel the next dialog, you can continue browsing un-pestered.

Why is Elon asking them to stay late and be "hardcore" if there is nothing to do?

From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...

I'd imagine that's because it's same way he ran his other companies.

And hell, hiring that many people at once is a lot of work to whoever left...

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.

That was broken when he bought it.

It wasn't – certainly not to the extent that he's destroyed it.

Twitter had profitable years but it wasn't really profitable...

And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.

I think there's a huge chasm between "management can't stop overspending beyond their decently high revenue" and "management is actively scaring away their revenue generators". I guess technically the former is "broken" but it's not broken in the same way the latter is.

I mean musky boi did show up that being the case. But it's not the firings that directly caused that, it's musk's starting to make sweeping changes from the get go and ones that drove the ad money away.

Twitter brought in $5bil in revenue in 2021. That doesn't sound broken. Whether they spent that money efficiently, and whether they could avoid FTC fines, is a different issue.

> That was broken when he bought it.

You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...

And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tells me that's not the case, though...

Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk.

They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.

Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load.

Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.

You also seem to have a very narrow definition of what failure looks like as defined by HTTP status codes.

It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.

What metric would you use? Daily impressions? Those seem to be up. Posts? Also up. Impressions, posts, and status codes are the measure of success (status codes of course being a proxy for earnings as well as operations given that if they go out of business they won't be returning status codes at all).

Politely.. it’s very clear from this post that you don’t seem to have any background in anything business related.

None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.

I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.

You’re just fantasizing. Twitter is fine. Thriving really.

How can you call a company that lives off ads and just lost its top ten advertisers "thriving"?

It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO.

However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe

Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality.

Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.

The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project.

It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).

Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.

[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states

"I sold all my fire extinguishers, got rid of all my insurance, and got rid of the locks on my doors yesterday, and nothing has happened! This proves no one needs any of these things."

> Twitter was operating way above it’s means.

But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)

> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though

Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.

Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.

So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.

You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.

Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.

>Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off.

The idea that a week or two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.

2 weeks is certainly nothing, I agree that the proof will be in the pudding. But so far, I remain unconvinced that Twitter is going to "break" in the traditional sense. If stuff goes down, we have protocol for bringing it back up. When 2FA dies, the process for recovering it is the same under Musk as it was under Dorsey.

We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.

This isn’t entirely true fwiw. That assumes a constant load on the systems. If you start running into a capacity crunch on a given system, your best case is scale horizontally or vertically using established procedures. But if you hit a limit there (vertical scaling limit, architectural limit) and actually need to refactor? Good luck!

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.

Or recognition that systems require ongoing work to delay and repair the inevitable entropy that grows within them.

The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.

>> nothing significant has broken yet.

Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.

> nothing significant has broken yet

A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.

Most of their big advertisers have jumped ship as well, their revenue will have cratered. Of course as a private company they won't need to disclose by how much, but engineers can't be paid with likes and retweets.

> If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed

This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.

Their cost in last 4-5 years grew faster than profits, their user base didn't increase that much, which means they have been hiring people that have less and less to do with turning profit to the company.

What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money

Staffing may or may not be related to whether a company is profitable.

It’s a news headline. So it’s less about accuracy and more about drama.

Normal according to who, exactly? Like where is your reference point for 'normal'? I've worked for companies at scale and have never dealt with these sort of problems before because usually there's an understanding that employees when laid off aren't going to do anything bad (unless you're perhaps cutting them out of severance and spiting them, which...).

Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe this is normal contrary to my own professional experience?

Many, many companies, particularly larger ones (5,000+ employees, but Silicon Valley companies are more likely than non-tech companies of a given size to employ "advanced" IT features like MDM) are concerned with potential sabotage by suddenly laid-off employees, particularly in the U.S. Have you ever worked anywhere with MDM installed on your company-provided devices?

Across basically every company I've worked for - this is normal. And many of those companies are not 3k+ employee tech companies. Think 10 to 100 engineers.

It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems.

If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cutting access (as long as security is there to escort them out afterwards). When everyone is remote - that is not an option.

ex: item number 1 for SOC 2 compliance is

----

Access controls

—logical and physical restrictions on assets to prevent access by unauthorized personnel.

----

When an employee is terminated - they are unauthorized personnel.

I think it's more the dichotomy of companies asking for high levels of commitment, loyalty & trust, but offering none in return.

It's funny that they would fire people in this way, then turn around and ask the remaining folks to sign up for "working long (uncompensated) hours at high intensity".

They are trying to have it both ways.

I mean - no offense... - but if you still think corporate entities have any real loyalty you've clearly not been paying attention for a long time.

I've never seen that attitude last beyond the initial 50 or so employees at a startup, and it sure as fuck doesn't last past the "we're installing monitoring software on all your machines" stage.

Work is what you do to get paid - it's not your family. It's not your friend. Don't treat it like it is.

That doesn't mean don't take it seriously, or respect it - just understand that work is your family like a hooker is your girlfriend - it's only true until the money runs out.

I'm not sure if you're directing that at me. We're saying the same thing.

The only scenario where I see this being an even remotely reasonably request is if you think someone is a severe risk for harming your systems should they be laid off. In every large company I've worked for (including ones involving high security systems) the standard was that you'd give people a week notice, maybe two weeks of an impending layoff along with a decent chunk of severance. This way those people being laid off could do a knowledge transfer and ensure that their domain experience wasn't lost and that you maintain a good business relationship with your employees.

To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.

It's quite normal, unfortunately. Nobody trusts their employees in a $44 billion company, definitely not in the wake of a highly-televised hostile takeover. They have the MDM software, they intend to lay off the employees anyways... there's no wrongdoing here as far as I can see. This is just how they do things outside the startup sphere, it's not like the CEO is going to schedule you a final Zoom call and have their receptionists bring you a bouquet of roses.

> It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.

You keep coming back to this - but even in companies where they do trust the employees - legal compliance is not a joke. If you're doing anything at all with customers who are in any of the following businesses...

Healthcare

Banking

Gov

Finance

Law practice

etc...

Then you turn off access when you fire an employee. Period. You can like them all you want, in which case you might go grab drinks with them afterwards - but you don't fuck around with access to your systems, because you lose your compliance certifications, or you get breached, and you lose a bunch of fucking money, you lose your enterprise contracts, and you yourself likely get fired.

Yes, access controls are critically important for many companies in many domains. My employer operates under such operating procedures. It seems reasonable that if your software collects and stores user information, employee access to all systems should be tightly controlled, and "turned off" if an employee is fired, laid off, or quits.

This is a great way to quickly lose critical information from your engineers. The few companies that do follow what you recommend end up scrambling when a key infrastructure engineer leaves, they immediately cut access and realize that he was the only one who knew how to work certain parts of the system. If you're the kind of company that conducts exit inteviews (which are the majority of large tech organizations) then you're no longer going to get any valuable info out of them by burning bridges like this.

You're misunderstanding the difference between a voluntary exit and a firing.

This is not standard procedure for a voluntary exit at most companies. The employee puts in their two weeks, works the time, and exits. The assumption is good faith on both ends, because the employee has chosen to leave.

It absolutely is the standard procedure for GETTING FIRED. The other standard part of getting fired is that the company has already decided they no longer need your skills or expertise (excluding twitter's situation, where they decided poorly - according to the news).

If you're laying off 100 people - the odds that any one of them might do something silly is very low. But that chance * 100 is usually considered an unacceptable risk from a security standpoint. Multiply it by several thousand, and it's absolutely not ok to leave the keys to the kingdom with that many fired employees.

All it takes is one drunk employee holding a grudge and you get a really nasty mess on your hands. Not to mention legal hot water.

When I was laid off security walked me from a conference room near the exit to my car. I was not even allowed to collect my stuff from my desk, had to have a friend bring it to me after.

Yeah, that firing process is deeply dehumanising.

This happened to my boss, the IT manager at a law firm, when he was fired. Part of his firing was due to complaints by the IT staff, the rest for other reasons. I deactivated his account while he was at lunch, his staff -- three of us, as I remember -- were told to leave for the day, and he was escorted out when he returned from lunch.

One company I'm personally familiar with announced a layoff at a branch office a couple months in advance. When the main branch people showed up two months later to manage the layoff, the building was looted clean and nobody was there. Even the furniture was gone. Only trash remained.

Source please? It really sounds like a myth but let’s see your source

My source is myself. I knew the people involved. No, I'm not going to name names.

Twitter is notoriously overstaffed, and any new management would start by cutting non-essential engineer positions.

Elon? Is that you?

> don't really understand what there is worth talking about here.

Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"

Any and every attempt to report on the fallout from Musk buying twitter will command the headlines. Doesn't matter if it's the same strategy any other takeover management would employ. That's irrelevant. Musk? Bad Guy.

So: "Elon Bad. Twitter suffer. Here's an example..."

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

This is almost a truism. When someone reaches an extreme position, they can never be ordinary again and they will be judged by absolute terms.

Nonsense.

Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.

They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.

I mean, the running joke in the industry was that you could fire 90% of Twitter's workforce and the company would still run fine. Judging by how few features they've shipped in the past few years, I'm still convinced that's the case.

We'll see when they actually start shipping stuff. Things tend to go smooth when nothing gets deployed...

Right in the article: blue check mark changes. And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

Because blue check was released with no issues what so ever?

"No issues" is a requirement from some other context. Probably.

> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".

I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.

True. But the article does not mention that it was the boss who told the author to pitch in:

>Some of us had worked through the weekend trying to help out a colleague who’d been given an insanely tight deadline

Note: the deadline was given to "a colleague", not to "our team". Same here:

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in.

Also note that he seems to never have worked on such a schedule before:

>I actually quite enjoyed it.

> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects

April 25th, Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/twitter-l... --- https://archive.ph/CK1X1

> For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.

> Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.

April 26, Twitter is protecting its source code from disgruntled employees, reports say https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/twitter-lock-source-code-e...

---

For several months, nothing that was not business critical was released (or done). If you were on something that wasn't business critical, you were likely waiting for a fire to fight, working on the "ok, maybe after this all blows over I can deploy this - but not until then."

In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.

>In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.

In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:

>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.

That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.

PS. Also:

>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday

Sweet Jesus. Just "as soon"? Just three??

Yep.

>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday

Just when? Just three??

Literally never heard anyone say this before

I doubt that's actually true (I don't doubt that Twitter had too many employees, but I think 90% redundant is a bit hyperbolic), but even if it was, there are good ways and a bad ways to reduce workforce. Musk chose pretty much the baddest of the bad ways.

> Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.

Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.

As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.

It does seem to be the case, I'm just not sure what's worth reading into here. Billionaires do stupid and terrible things constantly, if any of these passionate sideliners actually cared about that stuff then they'd be out for Larry Ellison's head for buying Lanai, or asking Steve Jobs about his $40 million jet.

The whataboutism never fails to show up. It's entirely possible to attempt to address one issue and having missed, not looked into or plain having been wrong about another one.

This isn't an issue, though, and there's no way to address it. A traded company went through a hostile takeover and the current customers aren't happy - it's a story as old as capitalism itself. If people object to the way it was sold, they should criticize the free market. If people are unhappy with billionaires using their money to tangibly hurt the planet, there are much scarier boogeymen to hunt down than the guy who everyone on Twitter hates.

"Bad things happen all the time", "we can't change it can we" and "there are worse people" are cop outs at best. People can worry about multiple things, and things can get talked about.

The Jet doesn't have a family to feed. Also, people complaining probably have been using twitter and have a little virtual skin in the game. Maybe you could call that entitlement.

Though he is heading on the path of Dr Evil, let's just admit it.

Why so? Without control freaks, I think Twitter is a better cess pool now.

The only really important aspect here is that he is a bad business man and Tesla and SpaceX had to manage Elon rather than then the other way around in order to be successful.

Right? Such a liability. I read they had to tie him to his Roadster just so they could actually launch the SpaceX rockets. Unbelievable.

I guess I can buy that some of the criticism is objectively gratuitous but, humans hating everything another human does, if that human is hated themselves, isn't really anything new.

I guess the real question is, why should anyone expect Elon to have exemption from the hate game that everyone else is apart of?

Well, no one wants him to have exemption. But every discriminator tool that always answers positive, is a useless discriminator tool. Anyone can use or not use that tool. Personally, I think participating in the whole hate fest diminishes one's self so I don't. But to each their own.

Those are not new comments about musk no? I’ve heard them for years.

> It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"

To be fair, that's been going on at least 2-3 years. Way before he got involved with Twitter.

Yep. And the entire media apparatus changed its behavior at the same moment into the same direction. Weird.

Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.

> Corporate media

People like to read that stuff.

Do they, or are they emotionally manipulated into reading it?

There's a difference between "wanting" and "liking" something. The reason doomscrolling on social media is a thing is because people want their fix. Whether or not they truly like it is another matter. Most would probably admit they don't, if they really sat down to unpack everything about it.

I agree. However, Twitter employees know what they signed up for, so this article is really just taking advantage of people who have never heard/seen this happen. It's fairly common in the industry, even if the results are disappointing and impact is ineffectual.

It feels good to say stuff like that but it's not really true. A look over Pulitzer Prize winners from previous years will show deeply researched investigative stories and have had a real impact on public awareness.

The vast vast vast majority of content news media generates is not like that, its drama farming and reposts. The actual investigative journalism is a very small minority.

So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.

I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring clickbait articles, I don't really see how you'd quantify it.

Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."

Well like I just said, I'm not convinced looking at it through overall number of worthy/unworthy stories published is a metric that makes a lot of sense.

But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.

I am formally challenging the notion that if corporate media were to disappear, people would suddenly lose their will to report and investigate on serious affairs that make up the tiny fraction of valuable content. If anything, there is a likelihood that people would even feel more compelled to do so with the understanding that they cannot expect major news outlets to do the work for them. I do however champion the loss of the will to report on everything other than that in corporate media’s hypothetical absence.

We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.

In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.

Your average individual would have investigated something regardless of the presence or absence of corporate media, mostly because these stories don't just immediately happen; they take months of work where the public obviously has no clue what is or isn't being looked into.

But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.

> But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.

The irony of this is that the reach of corporate media is effectively deadened due to the reason that we’re having this discussion at all: the same outlets bely their own influence by publishing worthless content. In a world without corporate (news) media, there are still other ways to get news out through the wire.

Credibility is a good point, but speaks to a larger discussion on whether credibility in the media is based off of reputation, legacy, acolytes, accolades, etc?

At the end of the day, if the fall of corporate media effectively obliterates peoples will to “speak truth to power”, as the journalists like to say, then society is in pitiful shape and those whose will would disappear along with the Post, the Times and the Tribune lack integrity.

Well, question is really who will pay investigative journalist ? Independently funded ones would be overall better option but that's not exactly easy sell ("I might or might not produce some content once in a while") and "getting the name for yourself" first is pretty much requirement for crowdfunding.

To consider financial incentives or any sort of funding is an affront to those affected by a serious matter that may warrant an investigation.

Yet people doing the investigation have to eat and if they are good at their jobs it's better that they do their job, full time, instead of having "investigative journalist" as a hobby in addition to their "normal" job

Your’re tiptoeing around the gravity of situations such as, “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.” [Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, 2014] I would hope that the people who are involved in uncovering actions like this don’t perceive their practice as a mere job or a hobby, relative to whether they’re paid for it.

In the scenario we’re discussing (a world without corporate media), people who truly care enough about events, plots and schemes that threaten the moral fiber, dignity, agency and safety of humanity will see to it that they’re uncovered. That is unless, all investigative journalists are frauds who are driven only by glory and gold.

What you’ve described would be “better”, sure. It would be “better” if it rained during a drought than if it didn’t. But what are people going to do in the meanwhile?

Is “corporate” media the only kind of media there is that can present the news either way?

I'd accept "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" or "Nobody can play the oboe!" as a kind of colloquial hyperbole that works in part because people know it's hyperbole and there's a shared sentiment ("we all would find being out in this weather or the difficulty of learning to play the oboe well relatable").

It's a poor contribution to a conversation about the value of media as business enterprise because it's really not clear what the hyperbole is or what the common relatable point is supposed to be. And it might even be subtly nihilistic or privileged ("who's to say I can't believe whatever the hell I want regardless of what them news people say, they're probably just pushing what they want to believe just I like I am anyway").

So "only some fraction of the corporate media's output has intellectual value" would be an improvement. Increased clarity often is.

And it could lead to actually useful understanding, which is that a LOT of things which have high rates of mediocre or even useless output still have value.

Ugh, can we stop interpreting everything so literally? People embellish and use hyperbole for effect. Whenever someone says "always" or "never" (or similar terms), they very rarely actually mean those absolute terms, because most things in the world have exceptions, and most people actually do know that.

If you're genuinely confused by this kind of usage, and actually believe that those absolute terms are used sincerely, then I don't know what to tell you... maybe try to understand culture and language usage better?

> So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.

I'm pretty sure the original was hyperbole but more accurate statement would be "most of what corporate media produces have zero or negative value and is just facilitator for the clicks"

You are referring to the other extreme in terms of types of writers. These investigative journalists compose a tiny percentage of the overall population of corporate media writers.

I just took a look at the Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative reporting[0] and I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further.

If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.

That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.

[0]https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206

Whoa, you didn't hear about Roy Moore?

> I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further... I have never heard of

We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.

Wow. This is kind of hurtful being that I consider myself informed about topics I'm interested in. For example YMTC's 232-layer NAND flash was something I heard about as soon as it broke. I don't have a newspaper subscription so it's hard to keep up with everything being that most news on the internet is the same rehashed for content years on end or meaningless celebrity trivia/drama.

I don't think the grandparent meant "nothing" literally. But I would agree that the vast majority of corporate media reporting is garbage. The Pulitzer Prize winners are unfortunately the rare exceptions to the norm.

> Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value.

Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?

> Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?

The C of BBC does not look like the current practical meaning of corporation for or typical case. Being state-owned change a lot of things.

Top 10 articles from the front page of nytimes.com right now:

* E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks

* A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it.

* U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers

* Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market?

* Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy

* As Officials Ease Restrictions Amid Protests, China Faces New Pandemic Risks

* Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find

* Kanye West was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika.

* Cameroon Tries to Become Third African Nation to Advance

* From The Athletic: Follow real-time updates from Serbia vs. Switzerland.

Sure, some of these (e.g. first twitter headline) seem to follow an agenda, but most of these are just plain old news. It is easy to think "all of this is available on Twitter or through other independent journalists", but twitter has the luxury of being able to look at what the papers are reporting on. If you didn't have the likes CNN, NYT and the BBC, you wouldn't have reporters at white house press conferences, people reporting from Ukraine, nor any sort of real curation of the news.

Are there blind spots? Of course. Twitter is way better in some niche areas. Do the news outlets show biases? Yes, of course. But without the big news outlets, twitter wouldn't have as much to go off of. I like to think of it the other way around... imagine that corporate media didn't exist. You'd have thousands of independent journalists looking into different things with no curation. Eventually, some of them would realize that to be effective, they need to form groups, since some areas are too big for one person to cover. Eventually, small groups that people followed would grow larger as they try to report on more and more things. Eventually, they'd collectivize and form larger "corporations". You'd be back to square one.

And I'm just talking about plain old news. All of this is leaving aside the big and costly investigative pieces that some of the larger outlets are able to put together. Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.

> Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.

BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize

BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/pulitzer-priz...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...

Though make sure that you differentiate BuzzFeed News from BuzzFeed... the later is the way that makes money that is able to support news site without needing subscriptions and paywalls.

BuzzFeed News is corporate media.

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